Driving Crosscountry 2020 : Welcome to California & the Pacific Northwest

Now THIS is the scenery I expected when traveling through the Pacific Northwest! Lush green trees,, with the giant redwoods and sequoias towering over the rest. A beautiful part of the country!

Driving Crosscountry 2020 : The Weasku Inn in Grant's Pass, Oregon

If I had to choose the treasure out of all the accommodations we had over these couple weeks, the winner would be the Weasku Inn. (The name is. Play on words, as it is pronounced "We Ask You in." Came upon it by chance in calling around in the pitch darkness of the night. One cabin left. The picture perfect example of the American Northwest.

It had an amazing view from.the porch. I didn't get the stream in the picture, but I remember it was quite strange with some kind of flowing water plant.

It was here that Shana revealed this set of bracelets. One has a bird. One has a tree. They symbolize giving our children, Leia and Harvest, both roots and wings through this journey.

Driving Crosscountry 2020 : Nevada

Nevada is the only state sign I didn't take a picture of, and I think that's because we crossed into it at night. These pics of.the last of the Great Basin in Nevada were from.the next morning.

Driving Crosscountry 2020 : Welcome to Oregon

 We finally made it to Oregon! Wow, did it look different than we expected! We expected a lush green forest, and what we got was Eastern Oregon which is practically a desert. Looked just like the great basin except it had a little bit more green and some of these yellow flowers growing everywhere. It turns out that it was called the Oregon outback.

 We also saw these chain up areas every few miles. Which we found out was where trucks and cars could pull over to put chains on their tires in the snow months, because this is such a high elevation.

 Then finally everything got more green and we could start seeing giant redwoods and Sequoias as peak over the top of the usual tree line.

Driving Crosscountry 2020 : The Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah

 At the very Western edge of the salt lake basin, is the most serial place we've visited which was the Bonneville salt flats.

 It began as this salty slush on the side of the road. It looked exactly like slush after a snowstorm.

 It even felt exactly like slush, with none of the coldness though! You can tell by my face that it was very surprising!

  Then suddenly, on both sides of the road for miles and miles, were these  Salt flats marked by many cracks in the crust. After feeling the strange salt slush, we thought this was going to feel like table salt or more like the salt in the slush on the side of the road, but it did not. It was very very hard and sharp!

 As you can see from this picture, if you put your whole weight on it, you would make footprints, indentation in the salt crust.

 Seeing the sunset over the salt flat was one of the truly magical moments of this entire trip.

You can see from this picture that the salt flats were literally right beside the road on both sides. In fact, you could DRIVE ONTO THEM if you wanted.  And we noticed that many people actually did! It seemed to be the popular thing to take your truck and drive donuts around the salt flats with your friends if you were a teenager. After the beautiful sunset over the salt flats, we also saw people made fires in the middle as well. Such different activities in this part of the country!

 And even though it is a strange photo, I thought it was important to show the amount of salt on our feet after coming back from here.